The first part of the paper offers the characteristics of the affective variables of willingness to communicate, motivation, language anxiety and boredom as located within the framework of the complex dynamic systems. The second part aims to discuss the results of a study intended to examine the effect of "Second Life" on two English…

Debates on the philosophical interpretations of quantum physics have motivated a renewed interest in how secondary and lower undergraduate students interpret quantum phenomena. In an attempt to contribute to this effort, this paper examines the dynamics of perspective in quantum physics in the context of teacher education. The goal of the study is…

Motivation, a major contributor to the acquisition of language skills, can be promoted consciously through principled methods. This study investigated the impact of cooperative learning (CL) on foreign language (FL) learners' motivation in Iran. Both quantitative and qualitative measures were applied to pursue the aims of this study. The…

The current study analyzes three locative English prepositions, above, on, and over from a cognitive semantic point of view. Since English is a foreign language for Iraqi students, these prepositions pose a problem for Iraqi university students. The complexity of these three prepositions inspires the researcher to use the Cognitive Linguistic (CL)…

Gaining insight into how one's noticing shapes decision making can enable a teacher to reflect on how they frame, interpret, and respond to classroom activity and disrupt the influence of dominant ideologies. Working in the context of teacher education, we conjectured that systematically analyzing and reflecting on their own noticing can enable…

As the college student population grows increasingly diverse, there is a need for instructors--including graduate student instructors (GSIs)--to have a set of pedagogical tools that enables them to create inclusive classroom environments, those that consider their students' identity and provide equal opportunities for learning. However, the…

This research aims to assess the impacts of the COVID-19 epidemic process on the knowledge, thoughts, actions, and awareness of primary school pupils regarding "healthy life," in accordance with the attainments of the Turkish Life Science curriculum. The research was conducted using phenomenology. Maximum variation sampling was utilized…

The world is facing increasing crises such as climate, inequality and disease, which are set to impact student futures in devastating ways. Without a change in the way citizens think at the ballot box and the supermarket, these crises indicate an intensification of global disaster with very real consequences. This paper deploys critical theory in…

Cosmopolitanism is an ancient Greek notion which in modern times has found its way into educational practice. It expresses a moral responsibility toward everyone irrespective of cultural background, looks or ability. However, it is an ideology difficult to operationalise and convey in education if the objective is to change learners' attitudes for…

We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students' religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that abolishing compulsory religious education significantly reduced…

Developing computational thinking (CT) skills at an early age can help develop literacy, science, and mathematics skills; however, CT instruction in grades K-2 remains limited. This study examined the perceptions of 45 K-2 teachers from 30 school districts before and after a CT professional development (PD) experience. The PD included two online…

'Difficult' or potentially discomforting diversity topics and critical, unsettling pedagogies often induce resistances or charges of 'irrelevance' in teacher education contexts. In teaching with these topics and pedagogies, there is often a significant emphasis on fostering and utilising the process of "empathy" in productive ways to…

Prospective elementary teachers may enter their teacher education program having experienced science more as a collection of definitions and facts than in ways that support rich engagement with scientific phenomena. As a result, their visions of themselves as science teachers may not align with the most recent understandings about how to teach…

The annual National Collegiate Soils Contest (NCSC) has long been anecdotally recognized as a beneficial event for participating students to practice soil profile descriptions and landscape interpretations. The objective of this study was to quantify student learning outcomes and to identify how students' perspectives shifted over the course of…

Drawing is a long-standing tool in the natural sciences, but training in this skill set has lapsed. We describe the impacts of field sketching instruction on the teaching practices of faculty and the experiences of students in two sections of a freshman-level course on natural history. We examine self-reported data from participating faculty and…